My dou­ble life!

Stephen Man­gan plays a man torn between two part­ners…

On the sur­face, travel writer An­drew Mars­den seems like any or­di­nary hus­band and fa­ther go­ing away on a busi­ness trip. In fact, An­drew is liv­ing between two fam­i­lies – and he’s des­per­ate to keep his dou­ble life a se­cret in Sky One’s com­edy drama Bliss.

As the six-parter be­gins this week, An­drew has told wife Kim (Austin Pow­ers star Heather Gra­ham) and daugh­ter Christina he’s at­tend­ing the ‘world’s third-old­est chorizo fes­ti­val’ in Bil­bao, Spain. But he has no in­ten­tion of get­ting on a plane.

He’s trav­el­ling to the other side of Bris­tol to spend some time with his other fam­ily: part­ner Denise

(This is Eng­land’s Jo Hart­ley) and son Kris.

As An­drew darts from one fam­ily to the other, he goes to ex­treme lengths to en­sure that Kim never finds out about Denise – and vice versa.

Avoid­ance

‘An­drew’s putting off the day of reck­on­ing,’ says Episodes ac­tor Stephen Man­gan, who plays him. ‘It’s like that pile of let­ters you need to open or pay­ing your tax bill – you know one day you’re go­ing to have to deal with it.’

Re­search­ing for the role, Stephen was sur­prised to learn that An­drew’s story is not that un­usual…

‘I dis­cov­ered it’s more com­mon than you’d imag­ine,’ he re­veals. ‘Al­most ev­ery­one I spoke to knew of some­one or had a close friend who had a se­cret fam­ily else­where. It’s such a stress­ful ex­is­tence, though. I’ve got a fam­ily and it’s nearly killing me just hav­ing one!’